Faculty Research Grants
Research Grants are distributed to Cornell faculty each year. Proposals are judged by faculty from the CAHRS Advisory Board. Research supported by grants must have relevance to CAHRS partner firms. Faculty communicate the results of their research to partner firms in many ways, including workshops, partner meetings, working groups, and working papers.
Brad Bell
Enhancing Self-Regulation and Learning in Technology-Delivered Instruction
Now more than ever organizations must rely on workplace learning and continuous improvement in order to remain competitive. However, the challenge organizations face is how to deliver learning to employees in today's dynamic, distributed, and global business environment. This requires a shift away from traditional classroom instruction as the primary source of training and an increased emphasis on using technology-delivered instruction(TDI) to provide employees with training anytime and anywhere. This study will take a process approach to examine several dimensions of self-regulation at multiple points in time during TDI.
Chris Collins
The Interactive Effects Leadership and Human Resource Practices on Employee Engagement and Organizational Performance
The popular press has been littered the last five years with importance of employee engagement and company executives and consultants agree that employee engagement is one of the keys to sustainable organizational performance. Unfortunately, we as academics may be a bit more skeptical about the importance of employee engagement for several reasons. First, there is a great deal of inconsistency in how consulting firms and organizations talk about and measure employee engagement. Secondly, there is not much in the way of empirical evidence to demonstrate the positive effect of employee engagement on firm performance and competitive advantage. Finally, there is little academic research that has exploded the ways that companies can systematically build and maintain employee engagement. This study will help explore the following questions: (1) What are the relevant dimensions of employee engagement and (2) How can companies increase employee engagement?
Lee Dyer
Allocation, Project Team Alignment, and Project Team Performance and
Assessing the Relationship Among Performance Measures
The first study Allocation, Project Team Alignment, and Project Team Performance is to inform human resource theory and practice by using a mediated model to examine the effects of talent allocation processes on project team performance, using project team talent alignment as the mediator. Overall this effort will result in a unique longitudinal dataset capable of providing methodologically sound insights into the extent to which, the ways in which, and the conditions under which, talent allocation influences project team talent alignment and, in turn, project team performance. The second study Assessing the Relationship Among Performance Measures will begin to sort out the causal relationships among a number of commonly used dependent variables, all measures at the unit level: morale, turnover, performance (shrinkage and an internal audit measure), customer satisfaction, revenues and profitability.
Kevin Hallock
Managing Layoffs: Why Managers Fire Workers and How it Affects the Bottom Line
There has been a great deal of literature on the effects of job loss on workers but little has focused on the effects of job loss on firms. This study will take an interdisciplinary approach to investigate what happens to firms around layoffs including ideas from economics, sociology, law, political science, finance, organizational behavior, human resource management and industrial relations.
Sarosh Kuruvilla
Retention Practices of MNCs in China
This study will seek to understand the variation in retention practices in multinational corporations operating in China, and the relative efficacy of these practices. This research project purports to answer three research questions: (1) What is the nature of current MNC retention practices in China, how do they vary and which locally responsive practices have been developed? (2) What are the effects of these practices on employee's voluntary turnover? and (3) What are the organizational determinants of the adoption of locally responsive retention practices?
Lisa Nishii
International Human Resource Management: The CRANET Study, Round 2 Data Collection
This study will collect standardized HR data from a representative sample of organizations in each of 30+ countries every 3 years in an effort to build a unique longitudinal and internationally comparative HR dataset. In 2005 the first dataset was collected and it is now time to collect the second round of data. This research project will examine how various cultural dimensions simultaneously impact the HR practices that are adopted by organizations and their relationship with organizational effectiveness.
Patrick Wright
Human Resource Leadership: The Changing Role of the Chief Human Resource Officer
Each decade seems to see a new paradigm that gathers the attention and focuses the activities of HR professionals. While Compliance guided the 1970's, Strategic HRM the 1980's, Strategic Partnering the 1990's. HR Leadership seems to have emerged as the dominant paradigm of the 2000's. This study describes a stream of research aimed at better understanding the changing role of the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), particularly as this role demonstrates the model of HR Leadership.
